For a long time, the games industry
debated the question of whether a videogame could make you cry. But as I
hope to demonstrate, this question is either irrelevant, or a game
never has nor never could make you cry.

Over on Raph Koster's perpetually interesting blog, a discussion recently broke out pursuing once
again the question of the boundary work: what actually constitutes a
game? Are titles like Wii Music – which lack explicit goals
– really games? The term “imposter” games was bandied about,
although I prefer 'non-games' myself. Discussions like this highlight
that at the heart of such debates are the issue of how one
defines “game”, and in this there are many choices.

The principle camps that this breaks
down into are the systems-focused perspective that considers games to
be formal systems with mechanics, goals, challenges, measures of
success or some other metric or progressive element. There is vast
variety in these positions but for the purpose of this discussion I
intend to collect them all under the “games as systems” label.
Conversely, there are those who endorse a wider definition of game,
such as myself, who principally reach their position by following a
line of thought heavily influenced by the French intellectual Roger
Caillois. In his observed patterns of play, he casts the net for games very
wide indeed – including, for instance, recreational skiing and
theatre in the remit – partly as a consequence of the word for
'game' in French (jeu) being
also the word for 'play'. These positions I will collect under the
heading “games as play”.

It is readily apparent that under the
“games as play” approach, the question as to whether a game can
make you cry is ridiculous – since theatre comes under this
definition, games under these kinds of definitions had always already
made people cry, even before the first videogame. You could tighten
up the definition to exclude purely narrative forms, but then (as we
shall see) we fall into the other trap.

From the “games as systems”
approach, the problem is that the formal system aspects of games
evokes a number of emotions – Nicole Lazzaro has grouped these into sets in her 4 Fun Keys model – but none of these emotions will
make you cry, except perhaps frustration (a form of anger), as
happens when a game drives you to such rage that you throw your
controller across the room. But these kind of tears are not what the
question we are pursuing is talking about: it is referring to tears
of sadness or tears of joy – the kind of emotional response that
one can have from a story. And tellingly, Nicole's initial paper on
her model is subtitled “four keys to emotion without story”.
Story has to be excluded, because by the process of empathising with
fictional characters it is possible to evoke any
emotion in a story.

This is the nub of
the issue here: a story can make you cry by empathising with the
protagonist (or another character), but a game (when viewed as a
formal system) cannot do this. It follows that the only way that a
videogame can make you cry is by using narrative tools that have nothing
to do with games as formal systems whatsoever. So even though, for
instance, many people report that they cried when they played Final
Fantasy VII at the fateful scene (and indeed, several other cRPGs
also show up in player studies as having provoked tears) the
moment that actually brought the player to tears was a
non-interactivecut scene. It wasn't the game (in the
systems view) that made them cry – it was the story – and there
never was a question as to whether stories could make you cry.

Hence this
question collapses in upon itself. Under the “games as play”
view, the question is entirely irrelevant, and under the “games as
systems” view, it is the story-aspect of a game that has made
people cry, not the game itself. I therefore conclude that a videogame has
never made you cry.

The most plausible
objection to this claim that I can see is that by letting you play
with characters in the system-aspect, the cRPGs deepen your
relationship to these characters, and thus allow the catharsis
triggered by the story element. I'm open to this objection, but since
a purely narrative form would have allowed you to deepen your
relationship with the characters without interaction, it's far
from clear that allowing interaction is enough to make the claim of a
game making you cry (under the systems view) unless it can
make you cry within the systems-play. But when a character
dies during gameplay, the option to reload is essentially always
present (removing the catharsis from death) – even if you have to
turn the game off and on again to achieve it – and if it were not
you would be more likely to feel frustrated at being manipulated than
to experience the cathartic effect.

One might also object on the grounds that role-playing (improvisational theatre, as in a tabletop role-playing game) might move you to tears, say, in a massively-multiplayer game. But is this kind of storyplay something we can honestly claim is delivered by the videogame itself, or does the game simply facilitate what could equally have happened without the game? Either way, it does not happen often in videogames and when it does it is usually as a consequence of the talents of the players, and not a result of the systems of the game. I am inclined to treat this solely as a a form of narrative and thus not included in the "games as systems" view, but of course this is not the only choice.

Games (under the
systems view) cannot make you cry. Videogame titles can include
narrative material that makes you cry, but no-one can claim to be
surprised that a story can make you cry. Barring some serious change
in what constitutes a videogame, the only way they are ever going to
make you cry is via their narrative elements, and never by their game
elements.

Eric J.: "Has the popularity of interactive fiction and "adventure games" fallen so far that we don't even consider them games anymore?"

Not at all, but they are sliding into obscurity gradually with every passing year, I'm afraid. :(

"I'll second the mention of Agro from Colossus; though I appreciate the "cut scene" distinction, we can't overlook that the emotional bond was formed during play."

Hmmm... I appreciate what you're angling at here, but how tenable is this distinction? I address this in the prepenultimate paragraph of this piece, and I think without the payoff also coming in play there is always a possible objection.

Thanks for commenting!

Kid Sisyphus: It's a shame you're insistent on pursuing the discussion here... The problem being that there are so many comments on this post now that it gets hard to get to the new ones! :) Plus, when you have philosophical commentary, it would be nice to put it where other people interested in the same subject can contribute.

So I'll reply to your comment here today, but I'll warn you now that if you want to continue this discussion I may well export the comment from here to Only a Game - don't say I didn't warn you! :)

"There is no realism; just a set of narratives preferable to others according to a specific set of ultimately linguistic systems"

Yes, this is essentially what I am saying in The Stories We tell. Since you and I seem to be on the same page here, there doesn't seem to be a further point of discussion in this regard.

"if freedom of belief is upheld, it necessarily means that we are unfree not to believe in freedom of belief, even at an individual level."

Not so - freedom of belief is a political level function, and one that is *already* in place in any country that agreed to the "Universal" Declaration of Human Rights.

People are free to reject freedom of belief at a personal level (to not believe in it) - what they are not free to do is enforce this belief on others. (Freedom of belief is thus universal, it is freedom of action which is not).

I don't see this as libertarian, personally, just an extension of existing human rights legislation. I'm not asking to minimise or eliminate the state, merely to uphold the spirit of what has already been agreed.

"These games without narratives... they just don't exist."

Only within your paradigm. I am making a distinction between constructed narrative and experienced (or derived) narrative - I'm not prepared to conflate what goes on in the construction of the game and what goes on in the head of the player, that strikes me as hugely overreaching.

Tetris contains no formal narrative. A player derives a narrative of some kind from their experiences, sure, but to claim that the mechanics of Tetris is narrative (in the sense this word is usually used) seems to me to force a square peg into a round hole.

Your problem seems to be an insistence of deploying 'narrative' in its widest possible sense. You are free to do this, of course, but you have blurred your terms together to the point of obfuscation of what's interesting.

A story built around characters, plot and emotions - a Dickens novel, say - is very different from the "narrative" a player experiences when playing Tetris. If you cannot represent this distinction in your language, then I would suggest your language has failed you in some significant sense.

However satisfied you are with your representation in your discussions with yourself, you must eventually accept that once you are talking to other people "the meaning of a word is how it is used" (following Wittgenstein) - and how you are using narrative is not how other people use it.

That, in essence, is why your argument hits a wall. It is not that your assertions are in error - they are not - it is that you seem to insist on forcing your definition of narrative onto other people, and that's generally considered a foul in the language game.